by amongthenumberedsaints

With everyone focused on the 5th anniversary of the Lehman failure, we are taking a quick look at how the world’s developed (G7) nations have fared since 2008, and just what the cost to restore “stability” has been. In a nutshell: the G7 have added around $18tn of consolidated debt to a record $140 trillion, relative to only $1tn of nominal GDP activity and nearly $5tn of G7 central bank balance sheet expansion (Fed+BoJ+BoE+ECB). In other words, over the past five years in the developed world, it took $18 dollars of debt (of which 28% was provided by central banks) to generate $1 of growth.

What is amusing, is the constant state of shock of supposedly serious people who are stunned that despite the Fed being constantly in the markets, and buying up trillions in securities, the US economy has not responded in a favorable manner. Of course, nobody has pointed out that if all it took to generate growth out of thin air without consequences was for the Fed to print, i.e., monetize debt, this would have started 100 years ago in 1913, and by now the US economy would be so advanced it would be colonizing Uranus. Logic, however, is not a Keynesian economist’s best friend.

The armed wing of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ own Fatah faction has declared war on Israel over what it said are attempts to lay the groundwork for the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem..

^^^Wow and woe! This Pope guy is totally false. Denial of the Holy Spirit, accepting the mark of the beast etc… defines the account of everyone in the last generation, which is defined by the good news of our Father in Christ preached throughout the world. This nutball’s offer is not a sign of a progressive, it confirms an evil moron tempting people straight to Hell.

Note that the journalists report that the SEC’s experts on whether such deceit was “material” to investors (“senior accountants and the head of the S.E.C. unit that oversaw corporate disclosures”) concluded that it was material. The fact that Lehman was so desperate to deceive its investors about the crises that would soon cause it to collapse that it sought out a legal opinion in the City of London (which “won” the ethical race to the bottom) to bless the deceit and proceeded to recurrently make large transactions near the end of quarters for the sole purpose of deceiving its investors and the SEC demonstrates that Lehman knew its deceit was material to its investors. That is a central reason why publicly traded firms engage in accounting fraud.

Al Jaber’s case appears to have arisen out of a wider U.S. Department of Justice inquiryinto the bank’s dealings in the Middle Eastern state. The bank has been accused of making illegal payments to members of the Saudi royal family in order to secure business ties.

Additionally the bank also remains under investigation in the U.S. and U.K. over the terms of a crucial capital injection by Qatar in 2008.

“As long as the fed is printing money, not very close. That is why the issue of tapering and where we go with it, is so important. I don’t really care whether we got to 70 or 65 in September. But if you tell me QE is going to be removed over nine or twelve month, that is a big deal. It is my belief that QE has subsidized all asset prices and when you remove that, the market will go down.”

We would normally show the chart of Claims but what’s the point: it’s a bullshit number, it is made up, and now even the BLS admits it. And frankly why not: in a world in which the only thing that matters is how much liquidity Chairman Bernanke will inject, why even bother to care about news and fundamentals, something we said first in the summer of 2009, when we said the only “financial statement” that will matter is the H.4.1